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nterview: Unreality: Epicís Mark Rein on the Future of Game Middleware

Middleware,
often a fast-shifting field, has been pushed even further into
the average developer’s field of view, with recent developments
such as EA’s purchasing of Renderware, and the advent of next-gen
technologies and next-gen costs for consoles.

Few have more to say
about middleware than Mark Rein, Vice President of Epic, maker of
Unreal Engine, as well as the Unreal consumer software, among others.
Regarding costs, Rein takes to task the estimates of many large
companies. To him, if your costs are going up so significantly,
you’re just not working smart.

Gamasutra:
Epic moved from keeping tools in-house to licensing them to other
companies. How does the focus of the company change as you have
to provide tools for other parties?

Mark
Rein: It doesn’t really – I mean, we’re the
number one customer for our own tools. So we have to provide tools
for our own internal developers, and it’s really no different
doing that than it is providing the same tools and support for other
people as well.

Gamasutra:
As a company, how do you balance making engines and making games?
Do you have shared members on both teams?

Mark
Rein, Epic Games Vice President

MR:
Well, we used to do it that way. We used to have one team, but we
didn’t really have specific engine people. And since we merged
Scion Studios into Epic we now have a larger mass of people –
we’ve over 60 people now – so we actually have a dedicated
engine team separate from the game teams.

Gamasutra:
Do you think it’s important to have multiple choices for physics
and audio plug-ins, or do you really want your engine to really
be the be-all end-all?

MR:
I don’t really know, to be honest. Good question. Audio engines,
why do you need multiple audio, I don’t really see the point
of that – if you have a good one and it works, go with it.
We have audio engines on all the platforms, but we’ve always
been a company that’s open to working with others. We have
our own audio engine, but some people still implemented Miles, or
some other audio engines in their games. We used Karma physics in
the past, but multiple licensees decided to use Havok instead. We’re
a pretty easy engine to integrate with, so I don’t think if
somebody’s really stuck with a particular kind of technology
piece, why they couldn’t add it to ours. But I think we do
have best in breed solutions to those problems anyway, I mean I
don’t think anybody’s going to have a better physics
system than Novodex. The Novodex guys are already up and working
on next-generation consoles, they were part of Intel’s multi-core
demo, they’re like us, they’re already way ahead in
terms of multi-core. I can’t see how somebody’s going
to come up with a better system than Novodex, but we’re not
going to get in the way of what our licensees want to do.

Gamasutra:
Do you think the acquisition of Renderware will affect who can use
it and who will want to use it?

MR:
I know that it affects who wants to use it, because big companies
that compete directly with EA don’t want to be paying EA money.
We’ve already been the beneficiary of that, so I don’t
want to jinx it.

A character created in the latest Unreal engine

Gamasutra:
Do you think anyone will be doing a game engine for portables?

MR:
I think one of the problems with the handhelds is that they’re
all radically different systems. So it’s not like you’re
going to take a PSP game and run in on a Nintendo DS. You build
custom games for each of those platforms. Whether people use custom
or purchased engines, I have no idea, it’s just not an area
of expertise for us.

If
Microsoft makes a handheld Xbox, we’re in there! I mean –
based on the current parts that are in the Xbox. But it’d
be awfully expensive to put that in a handheld. The PSP is an awesome
machine, that’s a really fantastic device, and I’d love
to have an engine for it, but it’s just not our area of expertise.

Gamasutra:
What do you think of statements from companies to the effect that
the first round of next-gen console games will require exponentially
increased budgets?

MR:
I guess one of the biggest things we’ve seen that’s
bothered us lately is big companies like EA going and tossing out
“it’s going to take $30 million to make a next-gen game”
and we just don’t see that. I mean we’re making our
next-gen games for 25-50% more than our previous generation games,
and when we hear those kinds of numbers, we think that’s just
bravado, that’s just them trying to scare their competitors
out of the marketplace.

We
don’t subscribe to that, we don’t think it has to be
ridiculously expensive to make next-generation games, and we’ve
done a lot of work – like our visual scripting system is a
perfect example – in making our tools really optimized so
that artists and designers can get the most out of the engine without
having to involve a huge amount of programmer resources. And artists
are relatively scalable, and designers as well, so we really don’t
see the crazy next-gen numbers that they’re talking about,
it just doesn’t seem believable.

Unreal Engine 3 in action

Gamasutra:
Activision and THQ have both publicly said that their retail costs
will go up $10.

MR:
I don’t believe that’s going to happen. I’d be
very shocked. I think they’re going to try, there’s
no question, but honestly I don’t believe that. I honestly
think the market won’t bear it! We’re already paying
$50 per game, I honestly believe for the majority of games, the
market will not pay $60.

That’s
just going to drive piracy through the roof, and people are just
going to revolt. I think we spend enough money on games, and I just
don’t think that’s reasonable. I think what you need
to do is make better games, take your time, do them right, and sell
more! I don’t think we’re ever going to have 20 million
selling games, until we bring the cost of those games down, not
up. I think the way to build the market is to decrease the cost
of the games, not increase the cost of the games.